Jeff Bezos Is Going to Space As Climate Change Threatens Life on Earth – Teen Vogue

After watching Laurence Fishburne get stuck in the deep dimensions of hell in the classic 1997 film Event Horizon, I lost any interest in space travel. If I ever have a chance to explore the worlds of the unknown, Ill choose the deep sea. There are so many different species of fish, sharks, and cephalopods that look like theyre from another planet. All the amazingly diverse creatures that exist on this planet are a wonder in and of themselves, and well worth saving.

Despite knowing that our way of life pollutes the planet, causes mass extinctions, and makes parts of the world uninhabitable, the powers that be seem to have their head in the stars instead of on Earth. On June 10, the Senate passed the U.S. Innovation and Competition Act, which, if passed into law, will devote $250 billion to fund science, research and development, manufacturing, and innovation.

Now a battle is mounting over how much our billionaire overlords can benefit from these programs. Currently, Elon Musks SpaceX is the sole NASA contractor for a lunar-lander program, which is focused on making it easier for humans to travel to the moon. Thanks to an amendment added by Democratic senator Maria Cantwell of Washington and Republican senator Roger Wicker of Mississippi, $10 billion of the new funding could go to Jeff Bezoss company Blue Origin for its work on a similar moon-landing project. Vermont senator Bernie Sanders voted against the amendment, calling it a Bezos bailout, but it passed the Senate, and the legislations fate is now in the hands of the House. As it turns out, Blue Origin is located in the state Cantwell represents, and the Intercept reported that the company spent $625,000 lobbying the Senate ahead of the additional amendment.

The two men often competing to be the richest person in the world are poised to get billions from the government to play space cowboys. As a recent ProPublica report revealed, these same two men have paid little to no income taxes for years. Yet they have obtained U.S. contracts that will further compound their repulsively immense wealth. Musk has already announced plans to try and colonize Mars, saying last year, "If there's something terrible that happens on Earth, either made by humans or natural, we want to have, like, life insurance for life as a whole." Bezos has set his sights on colonizing the moon, telling the media in 2019, Its time to go back to the moon, this time to stay.

The outgoing Amazon CEO is set to fly into space on July 20 on the New Shepard, a crewed rocket ship created by Blue Origin that Bezos hopes will usher in a new era of space tourism for the ber-wealthy, of course. (In a surprising upset for Bezos, British billionaire Richard Branson beat him for the title of first billionaire to travel to space.) Bezos has also talked about building massive, thriving colonies of up to a trillion humans in our solar system, saying that doing so would create an incredible and dynamic civilization home to 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins.

While spinning their ideas of space exploration as a win for humanity, the two billionaires have shown themselves to be anything but humanitarians. Employees at Amazon, which Bezos founded, have accused the company of union busting, maintaining strenuous work environments where workers have said they sometimes had to resort to peeing in bottles, and building warehouses with operations that pollute surrounding communities of color. Musks company, Tesla, has been sued, along with four other tech companies, for allegedly benefiting from the use of children in the cobalt-mining process in the Democratic Republic of Congo. (Cobalt is used for lithium-ion batteries.) In Boca Chica, Texas, where one of Musks SpaceX launching pads is located, scattered debris from exploded rockets has raised concerns about the potential harm to protected wetlands.

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Jeff Bezos Is Going to Space As Climate Change Threatens Life on Earth - Teen Vogue